Previews

Wanda and the Colossus

Spiffy:

The creative force behind ICO is back, and, well, creative.

Iffy:

Those looking for ICO and Yorda may be disappointed.

There was much fuss two weeks ago when the big countdown ended, and the world got its first glimpse of the sequel to ICO. Wanda and the Colossus, or at least the two or so artworks of it that were released, looked little like what anyone expected. But then, it's wise to expect the unexpected when it comes to the ICO team.

Today at TGS, Sony gave us a first glimpse at the game in motion with a short trailer. While not quite a revelatory experience of the sort some hardcore ICO fans might have expected, it nonetheless revealed some interesting details about the game and what we can look forward to.

The trailer starts off to the sound of lilting strings, probably guitar. The melody sounds very similar to something from ICO, but it's new. A warrior carries a prone girl through a sun-drenched temple. The sun effects are super-saturated, just like in a certain other game. The warrior lays her on an alter. Did she just stir? Regardless, this must be Wanda. Having set her down, the young warrior draws his sword and the scene fades out.

It comes back with a blaze of triumphant fanfare, with our hero riding a horse across barren fields. The graphics, again, look right out of ICO. The style is unmistakable. A variety of tremendously huge monsters attack in succession. One bizarre beast looks like a furry Mayan statue, which the hero handles by scaling its immense height and then stabbing its head. How curious that a small human can take down such an enormous beast.

Another monster is made of jagged rocks, which we can see the hero scaling, presumably to reach its head. The final creature is a flying insect/lizard thing, perhaps inspired by something from Nausicaa. Again, the hero jumps on with ease. It would seem that monster scaling, silly as it sounds, is one of the game's major gameplay mechanics.

And that's all there was to see. What have we learned? Well, Wanda doesn't seem to be the hero, unless the guy just has a really unfortunate name. The hero will use a horse to get around quickly, and can leap from it onto monsters. And finally, killing ridiculously large beasts is at least one of the major gameplay focuses. All very odd, and nothing like what we expected. But this is the ICO team, so we're more than happy to wait and see how things turn out. Odds are, this'll be the best horse-assisted monster-climbing game ever released.